{"id":22221,"date":"2019-11-13T10:27:58","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T10:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=22221"},"modified":"2024-07-18T11:38:07","modified_gmt":"2024-07-18T10:38:07","slug":"custom-bots-for-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/custom-bots-for-support\/","title":{"rendered":"How a chatbot sped up our tech support resolution time by 50%"},"content":{"rendered":"

If your support team is routinely asking the same set of questions at the start of every chat conversation, it\u2019s time to ask if you’re using the right tools to triage support issues.<\/p>\n

Recently our internal tech support team found themselves in this situation while providing support to our 650-person team spread across five offices and timezones. They offer rescue for a broad swath of issues, from account lockouts to AV issues and hardware requests.<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, some of these issues require immediate resolution while others are less urgent. To properly triage new requests and route them to the right specialist on the team, it was critical to gather a standard set of details for each request. In the past, the team manually collected these details, but that was negatively impacting their resolution time and not the best use of people’s time.<\/p>\n

In search for a better solution, the team recently started using Custom Bots<\/a> \u2013 our highly customizable bots for sales and support workflows \u2013 to reply to inbound requests and triage issues for the team. The result? Our team saw its resolution time drop by a whopping 50%, which translated to 39 minutes saved per issue.<\/p>\n

\"IntercomOur tech support team’s Custom Bot<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Think of what your team can do with that kind of extra time. The bot unlocks a massive amount of time for the team because it uses a set of structured questions to collect pertinent details from people before their conversation lands in the team’s inbox. Our tech support specialists have all the details they need the minute they pick up the conversation. They can get straight to work on the resolution instead of spending time on follow-up<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Since implementing Custom Bots, the team saw its resolution time drop by a whopping 50%”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s more, the bot automatically tags new conversations in the background, reducing the time that the team had to spend on reporting<\/a> while improving insights into the kinds of requests they were receiving.<\/p>\n

Improve how you triage support conversations<\/h2>\n

This need to triage is not unique to our tech support team alone. A triaging process is something that all<\/em> support leaders start to think about once their product’s userbase reaches a certain point and their team is no longer able to keep up with the volume of questions they’re seeing. As a support manager, you can try to throw money at the problem and hire more people, but that’s not a realistic solution. A better approach is to look at how your team is spending its time and make sure team members are laser-focused on the top issues preventing your customers from using your product. A good triage process can help support teams properly assess issues and prioritize the most critical ones.<\/p>\n

“Tools for triaging support conversations \u2013 especially support chats \u2013 have not advanced in years”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But tools for triaging support conversations \u2013 especially support chats \u2013 have not advanced in years. Triage remains manual, repetitive, unglamorous work. Teams often have a person whose whole job is to review new conversations, go back and forth with the customer to gather missing info, and pass the issue to the right specialist on their team. Painful, right? Some support managers even turn off chat and revert to lengthy forms and assignment rules just so they can make sure to get the information they need from customers.<\/p>\n

As our tech support team saw, you don’t have to sacrifice chat support in order to work more efficiently. Modern chatbots<\/a> are now capable of automating repetitive workflows, like triage for support teams and lead qualification for sales teams<\/a>. In particular, we’ve seen support teams use Custom Bots to triage high volumes of incoming chats with ease, freeing up team members for more complex support questions that require human troubleshooting. These bot workflows are easy to set up and more importantly, they’re dead simple for your customers to use when they’re looking for help.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how Custom Bots can help you triage support issues:<\/p>\n